1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to automatic interpretation technology, and more particularly, to an automatic interpretation system and method for generating a synthetic sound having similar characteristics to those of an original speaker's voice.
2. Discussion of Related Art
In general, existing automatic interpreters generate neutral synthetic sounds for translated sentences without giving specific considerations to the synthetic speech sounds delivered to the listener. Further advanced technologies also merely propose speech synthesis distinguished by a male or female voice based on the gender of an original speaker.
Even when considering only speech synthesis technologies let alone automatic interpretation, there have been attempts to express emotions, but the attempts did not extend beyond synthesis that is only able to express some emotions including happiness, sadness, anger, etc. based on a given sentence.
As occasions demand, in a conversation system such as a robot, etc., there have been attempts to analyze emotional prosody structures of anger, fear, happiness, sadness, etc. using personal prosody model information of a person who is a conversational partner and then add emotional information to a synthetic sound output by the robot using the analysis results. However, this approach uses vocal characteristics of a conversational partner and differs from automatic interpretation for translating and synthesizing a speaker's own speech. Also, since basic emotions of the conversational partner are defined and emotional information is assigned using the basic emotions, the approach is not appropriate for automatic interpretation that is designed to faithfully deliver the intention and emotion of an original speaker's speech to a conversational partner by imitating speech characteristics of the original speaker for translation and synthesis.
Meanwhile, at a conference in January 2015, working group (WG) 4 Culture and Linguistic Adaptability of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)/the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) joint technical committee (JTC) 1 subcommittee (SC) 35 User Interfaces selected user interface for automatic multilingual interpretation as a new project through voting by member nations.